


37 Across

by CommaSplice



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Crossword Puzzles, F/M, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-22
Updated: 2017-11-22
Packaged: 2019-02-02 10:23:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,557
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12724788
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CommaSplice/pseuds/CommaSplice
Summary: Sunday morning in Westeros. Rituals unite us.





	37 Across

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pacole](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pacole/gifts).



"I’ve discovered that there’s a deep satisfaction that goes far beyond filling in that last box to complete the puzzle, and what I’ve learned is more than just the fact that Charles Lamb was also known as “Elia” and a whole long list of four-letter European rivers. What I really love about crosswords is the struggle, trying to figure out how I’m going to go about solving it."  
\--Rabbi Geoffrey A. Mitelman

* * *

Tywin felt rather than saw his youngest son come into the dining room. Without looking up from the crossword puzzle, he reached out and gathered the sections, pulling them closer.

“Good morning to you too, Father. Not to worry, I have the _Times_ app on my iPad. We shall not have to fight to the death for the crossword.”

Unbidden and unwanted, a memory of Joanna floated into his consciousness. The Sunday paper, she had insisted, was meant to be consumed in bed, along with breakfast. And the crossword, she told him in no uncertain terms, was hers. In the all-too-brief time the gods had given him with Joanna, Tywin had on occasion, attempted to wrest the games section from her. He had always lost.

At one point, it had been easier to order two subscriptions, but even then Joanna bested him. He liked to work through methodically in ink. She was erratic in her approach to puzzle solving. She would use whatever was at hand, from an eyebrow pencil to the engraved Montblanc pen her father had given her, and before he knew it, would toss the completed crossword at him, offering to help him with a sultry smile and a challenge in her green eyes.

Tywin shook off the recollection and focused on the clues. He heard Tyrion tapping his answers onto his iPad. Neither Jaime nor Cersei had ever been much interested. It was Tyrion who devoured puzzles and word games of any kind. 

_Just like Joanna._

Tywin buried that realization away.

This particular crossword was more of a challenge than usual, which Tywin appreciated, but he found the theme irksome and 37 across was a particularly galling clue.

He was marking in “Oxcross” when he heard Tyrion close the cover over his iPad. 

“Still working on it, Father? May I help?”

* * *

“Red eye with lemon peel and salt,” the barista called out.

Asha glanced up from her Sunday _Times_ crossword puzzle. She was used to crazy coffee orders, but this one seemed really stupid. The purchaser was tall and blond and quite handsome, but he was an idiot for ordering crap. She returned to the puzzle, trying to lose herself in the clues. 

A few minutes later, she felt someone standing over her. “Mind if I sit here?” It was the blond guy.

“Yes.”

“I’m not trying to pick you up—it’s just that there are no other seats and I’ve got—”

Asha did what she normally did when people bothered her. She capped her pen, set the folded paper down, and looked him directly in the eye. 

He didn’t flinch, didn’t blink, and instead just smiled at her with a lazy expression she’d last seen on a mountain lion during an ill-advised camping trip with Justin Massey. 

Now the blond guy was frowning, probably because she wasn’t caving, wasn’t offering to move her bag off the other chair, wasn’t letting him sit his undoubtedly perfect, designer jeans clad-ass down with his bizarre drink order.

“I swear I won’t talk to you. See. I even have my own puzzle.”

Asha registered his _Westeros Today_ and the pencil in his shirt pocket. Lightweight, she thought. “I need a refill.” She held her glass up. “Tell Anguy it’s my usual.”

“You want me to buy you a drink?”

“And a toasted sesame bagel, dry. Butter on the side.”

“I was serious when I said I wasn’t going to hit on you.”

Asha was already wrestling with 14-Down. “Do you want to sit here or not?” She was surprised when he set down his red eye, and stood back in line to place the order for her. 

He returned all too soon. “They said it’ll be up shortly.” He took a sip of his drink and frowned. “Gods, that’s vile.”

Asha half expected him to march back to the counter demanding that they remake it, but he shrugged and, screwing up his face, drank more of the beverage. 

“Grande iced black coffee, toasted sesame bagel for Jaime!”

Jaime (it annoyed Asha that she now had a name to go with him) obediently rose and secured the order. He sat back down and took far too long to open up the newspaper, fold it over clumsily, and fumble with his left hand to retrieve the pencil from the pocket of his green plaid shirt. 

He was going to be the kind of guy, Asha predicted, who would need to say the crossword puzzle clues aloud to himself. She was about to articulate that he should on no account do this when she realized that the reason he was fumbling so badly with his left hand was because he had a prosthetic right one. 

For a half second she debated throwing him a bone. But, she reflected, if she was in his position, she knew it would tick her off to receive special treatment. “No talking means just that. Not even talking to yourself when you try to do the crossword.”

“I don’t do the crossword,” Jaime said. “I leave that to my little brother. Sudoku’s my game.”

They sat in silence for a while. Asha had conquered 14, 16, and 20 down and was in the process of beating 37 across into submission when she registered that Jaime was still gamely sucking down his red eye, practically gagging all the way. 

“Why are you drinking that if it’s not what you wanted?”

“Because it’s what I ordered.” Jaime swallowed the last of it. “My sister was telling me I’d love it. I guess it’s all the rage these days—I guess if they’re drinking something in Qarth, it becomes a trend. My fault for not going with the instinct that it sounded like an insane idea; the gods knows she has enough of them.”

“I think with salt you’re supposed to add it to the grounds,” she offered. “Like if it’s an inferior roast or really bitter. I don’t know about the lemon. Probably some lifestyle editor needed to come up with some copy and turned that into ‘it’s all the rage.’ “

He chuckled.

It was an attractive laugh, Asha had to admit, but he was so not her type and she suspected she wasn’t his either, so she went back to 37 across.

Jaime, meanwhile, jotted down numbers and erased them with such frequency she had to wonder that the newsprint was still holding up. 

Only 37 across stood between Asha and victory, but try as she might, she could not figure it out. 

“What’s the clue?”

“No offense, but you’re not going to be able to help me with this.”

“Probably not, but I could phone my little brother. He lives for those things.”

Asha tapped her fingers against the pen. “Ser Stafford’s last stand. Seven letters. Second letter is X, fourth is R and then—”

“Oxcross.”

“How did—?”

The lazy, dangerous smile was back on his lips. “—Ser Stafford Lannister, who is one of my less than distinguished ancestors—I even have an uncle named for him—he met his end in the Battle of Oxcross in 299 AC. I may not be that good with word puzzles, but my father was insistent we learn our family history.”

Asha checked and rechecked. It fit. “Thanks.” Then she pulled out the Moleskine notebook in which she recorded her solving times. “One of Pycelle’s better efforts.”

“Who’s Pycelle?”

She turned the paper so that he could read it and flicked her nail next to Pycelle’s byline. 

“People write crosswords?”

He probably thought that computers did it. “Yeah.”

“And get paid for it?”

Asha unfolded the _Times_. “It’s usually by the puzzle and it’s not great money, but yeah.”

“Wait, you write these too?”

Asha nodded. She texted her flat-mate Brienne that she would be back soon, slipped the journal and pen into her bag, set the rest of the newspaper on the shelf next to their, and took a last sip of her iced coffee.

“Jaime Lannister.”

She stared at his outstretched left hand for a moment before proffering her own. “Asha Greyjoy.”

* * *

Davos had never quite seen the point of crosswords. Reading had always been a struggle for him as it was, so wrestling with clever puns and wordplay for fun was not at all appealing to him. He wasn’t sure Stannis enjoyed them either, grunting and grimacing his way through the puzzles. But when Davos had suggested that perhaps Stannis could do something he found more pleasant, his partner had merely stared.

Stannis snorted. 

“What?”

“37 across.”

Davos didn’t bother to ask for clarification. At some point, Stannis would provide it. You had to wait the silences out with Stannis, Davos had found. He pushed the green peppers he was chopping for their omelets aside and began dicing ham.

“ ‘Oxcross,’ ” Stannis said. “Pycelle is as reliable as death and taxes. He is partial to House Lannister and medieval history.”

Davos had no idea who this Pycelle was or what Oxcross meant, but again waited. There was starting to be a rhythm to these Sunday mornings and it was one he deeply enjoyed.

“The man who constructed this.” Stannis inked in a few more letters, allowed himself a very small grimace of what Davos had come to recognize as satisfaction, sipped his red eye with lemon peel and salt, and at last, turned to the double-crostic.

He had never come out and asked Stannis why he did them. “Does your daughter do crosswords?”

“Shireen?” There was a pause. “I don’t know.”

Davos opened the refrigerator and fished out an onion and some mushrooms. 

A few minutes later, Stannis looked up. “Selyse never liked the _Times_ crossword, but she would do the one in _Westerosi Today_. Shireen had her own puzzle books and would sit with us in the living room while we did ours. What about your boys?”

Davos cast his mind back. He had been away so much. On the rare weekend home, it was usually spent trying to catch up on all the repairs and errands. “Matthos used to.” For the past few years it seemed like all that interested Matthos was his new religion. Marya had read to all of the boys. She had been the one to insist there be books in the house. But of his children, Matthos was the only one who had taken to reading and academics. “The rest take after me, I’m afraid.” He laughed. “They’re smarter, though. You’ll see when you meet them.”

“You are an intelligent man.”

Davos shrugged. “You know what I mean.” He began sautéing the omelet fillings.

“‘More than a texter needs to know.’ 3 letters. Ending in ‘I,’ I believe,” Stannis said.

Davos paused in the act of whisking the eggs. “Try TMI.” 

He considered that, lifted his pen over each box, nodded, and then inked in the missing letters. “As I said, you are an intelligent man.”

* * *

“I have a pen if you want,” Shireen said, offering it up to Devan.

“Oh.” Devan stared at the gel pen for slightly too long. Shireen was a whiz with crosswords. He was not. Maybe he could tell her he only liked to use some special color ink? Or that he only did crosswords with a mechanical pencil? But if he did that, he realized, he would sound like an idiot. “Uh, thanks.”

They were sitting on the secondhand sofa in the apartment he shared with his brother Maric and with Shireen’s cousin, Edric. Both Maric and Edric were gone for once. In theory, Devan knew he should be happy about that, but now all he could think about was that his hands were sweating way more than should be humanly possible and that Shireen was about to find out what a phony he really was. 

“My dad doesn’t like to use pencil,” Shireen said. She was folding the newspaper she had brought, first in half and then over again. 

Devan ordinarily liked how precise and careful she was. 

“Why not?” The real question was why had he lied and said he did crosswords in the first place. Well, he knew why. Shireen did them. Every day he saw her in the student union working her way through them and it seemed like a way to get her to like him. But he should never have lied about it. And now he was going to pay for that.

“He doesn’t like the sound it makes on the newsprint.”

They had hot tea with honey and lemon in front of them in the mismatched cups Devan had purchased from the thrift store. The cups sat on the coffee table—the one that Maric had found on the side of the road in a wealthy suburb of Rosby on bulk trash day. It had seemed great before—the three of them didn’t have much money—but now the rings on the mahogany surface where someone must have put down hot mugs without coasters looked pretty nasty. Kind of like the sofa with its hideous print of blue hydrangeas and indeterminate stains. “What about you?”

Shireen shrugged. “I use whatever. I mostly use the app, but I like doing them this way too.” She was filling out the clues now with frightening speed. 

Devan looked down at his own copy of the _Times_ , painfully aware that Shireen was already halfway done, that her hair somehow smelled like peaches, and that he could feel the warmth of her even with her sitting a foot away from him. The words swam in front of his eyes. He tried to focus. Breathe, he thought. That’s what his mother had always told him to do when he had to take a test. 

_Breathe. Read through the questions. If you can’t answer one, move onto the next._

“A Dirty Mother in old Valyria,” he read to himself. A dirty mother was a cocktail, but what it had to do with old Valyria, Devan did not know. He flicked his eyes down the list. “More than a texter needs to know.” Devan looked at the puzzle. Three letters. “Oh,” he said, this time aloud, and carefully blocked in T-M-I into the boxes. He filled out a few more, going very slowly and very carefully.

Most of these, though, he just had no idea. Like who was Ser Stafford and what was his last stand? Devan knew one of the letters was an “o” and there was a “s” and then after that, he was lost. “I’m uh, kind of new to this,” he said finally, knowing there was no way to fake it any longer. 

“The Sunday puzzle is the hardest,” Shireen told him. 

Devan looked up, startled to see that she was now peering over his shoulder. 

“Why don’t we both work on it?”

And somehow now it seemed like the most natural thing in the world to put his arm around her and puzzle out the clues together.

* * *

**Author's Note:**

> For the GoT Exchange. The prompts I used were: 5) AU: Stannis/Davos fluff and/or humour. Literally anything is fine.  
> 6) AU Wildcard: Any combination of the characters and ships I’ve listed, as long as the setting isn’t canon-related (not even canon divergence). 
> 
> Thanks to the incomparable <[Vana](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Vana/pseuds/Vana) for the beta read and the support.


End file.
